He further explains that the hidden center of at least part of his book is the figure of Jesus, but that figure was withdrawn, “partly because of my perplexities, partly through sage editorial counsel.”  He states again: 

Mr. Bloom’s apology for excluding Jesus is rather unsatisfactory and unfortunate.  It is unsatisfactory, because he includes Socrates, who never wrote down a word and was “authorial in the oral tradition”, but excludes Jesus who likewise was an author in the oral tradition.  The omission is unfortunate because apart from whatever “perplexities” Bloom might feel about him as an historical or religious figure, Jesus was the “creative mind” of a body of literature that can be examined on its own merit and compared favorably to the greatest literature of all time.  Jesus was, as Mr. Bloom says of Shakespeare, a literary genius who differed not just in degree, but in kind, from all others.   The balance of this article is devoted to examining the nature of that genius and why it differs in kind and not just degree.  

Creator of the Poetic Gesture

First of all, Jesus was a master and perhaps the greatest of all poets and fabulists, not only because he spoke the dozen greatest metaphors and parables of all time, he lived those metaphors and parables.  He incorporated them into the very gestures of his life in a way no other literary genius ever attempted, let alone achieved.  He was first and foremost the author of the poetic act. 

Shakespeare, like his fascinating creation Hamlet, may have suffered in accordance with his famous metaphor – he may have felt the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – but Shakespeare so far as we know never literally took an arrow to the heart.  How different was the poetry of Jesus, who not only said, “Come, take up the cross, and follow me”, but then actually shouldered that cross on the lonely path to Golgotha.  In this gesture Jesus demonstrated, like no other, how the sublime metaphor could be both word and act.

To the believing Christian, Jesus embodied metaphor in this same way in the performance of his miracles.  He said, “I am the bread of life”, and then literally proved it, by multiplying loaves and fishes for multitudes of thousands.  But even if we must disallow this figure, because it has validity only in the realm of faith, that is, one must first believe that he actually performed the miracle, nevertheless he demonstrated and lived the same metaphor in another manner, one that does not require faith in the miraculous. 

At the Last Supper, Jesus took the Passover bread, and “blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’”  One may doubt the miracles ever occurred, but no one can deny the existence of the ritual act of the sacrament.  It occurs to this day, thousands of years later, in thousands of churches every week across the world.  The poet who said, “I am the bread of life” managed to make a rite of the metaphor, which clearly on one level at least, still has vitality because the rite is still performed.  What other author, in either the oral or literary tradition, can lay claim to an accomplishment of this kind, the utterance of a metaphor that transformed into a living gesture repeated continuously by millions?

Reinventor of Hebrew Poetry

Second, Jesus is a master because of the way he consummated the literary tradition of the ancient Hebrew poets.  Not only did he create and live his own poetic figures, but he also incorporated and lived the poetic figures of the prophets before him in a way that transformed the writings of those prophets.  All literary geniuses will be influenced by earlier writers and may even reinterpret them.  Jesus did not just borrow from, or reinterpret, the work of early geniuses.  He transformed that work and in essence rewrote it, so that the earlier work now has a new and different meaning. 

Whatever can be said of how Shakespeare borrowed from Chaucer’s wife of Bath to create Falstaff (in Mr. Bloom’s words an archetypal vitalist), or borrowed from the Pardoner to create Iago (again in Mr. Bloom’s words an archetypal nihilist), none would claim that Shakespeare somehow went back in time and rewrote the depiction of the wife of Bath and gave it new meaning and richness.  Shakespeare created Falstaff, but that creation did not alter or transform the wife of Bath.  Nothing in Falstaff’s lustiness and zest for life changes an iota of Chaucer’s description of the wife of Bath, who “in felawshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe”.   Knowing Falstaff might give us a deeper appreciation of the wife of Bath, and we might speculate how the two could fall into fellowship together, but Falstaff does not change her.   

The poetic genius of Jesus, on the other hand, was such he literally reinvented earlier Hebrew poets.  When the Psalmist wrote, “They pierced my hands and feet”, that passage was, in fact, transformed and vested with new meaning by the crucifixion of Jesus.  He did not just reinterpret earlier writers.  In a sense he gave them their meaning, a deep, vivid meaning that to some extent went unrealized until his time.  Therefore, his gestures not only vested his own metaphors and parables with meaning, they vested the metaphors of earlier writers with meaning as well. 

Consider the following – were these images really fully understood until Jesus acted them out with the gestures of his life and death?

In a way no other poetic genius ever managed, Jesus literally clothed himself with the writings of earlier Hebrew poets, as with a garment.  He invested their old images with new life, resounding through the ages like a continuous fountain of water, and thus demonstrated the possibility of engaging in an eternal dialogue with time and the world. 

Creator of an Eternal Poetic Dialogue

Besides receiving Mr. Bloom’s book for Christmas, I also received a telescope.  My first night out with the instrument, I pointed it to the moon.  The telescope gathered and magnified the light of that object, reaching across a great gulf of uninhabitable space to an uninhabitable island.  The moon was barely beyond crescent phase, and yet in its contrast of light and dark, its deep, forbidding craters, it was a stark symbol of Otherness, a reflection of all that is not the self, of all that is outside the consciousness. 

Poetry is another moon – strange, mysterious, in many ways uninhabitable, but ever attractive, magnetic.  I mean poetry as distinct from the moral ditty – distinct from the homily in rhyme, frequently recited in sacrament talks and other sermons to improve manners.  I mean poetry, which is the expression of an entirely different consciousness, hopefully a more developed and advanced consciousness. 

To the believing Christian, Jesus possesses the most developed and advanced consciousness of all, the consciousness of a fully realized son of God.  But even to the nonbelieving, his literary consciousness, at least, must still rank among the most gifted and advanced.  At a minimum, what he accomplished through his words and gestures was the introduction of what must be termed its own unique and eternal poetic dialogue.

The human conscious and subconscious has absorbed so much of the life and death of Jesus, of his words and gestures, that, like it or not, we are continuing through time a persistent, recurring dialogue with the figure Jesus.  Think of the rogue who in some rough speech curses and takes the name of Jesus Christ in vain.  Or think of the more euphemistic expression of the British who say, Bloody, as in Bloody cross or Bloody well.  We simply cannot think of words like shepherd, or cornerstone, or nail, or cross, without the figure of Jesus factoring in and coloring and influencing our concept of those words.  And this is true not just of English.  Jesus has shaped the thinking and speech of not just the English language as has Shakespeare, but certainly the thinking and speech of French, Italian, Spanish and every other language that has developed and matured in a Christian tradition. 

Because of the nature of this eternal dialogue, the universality of Jesus is more complete and compelling than any other author, even than the universality of Shakespeare.  Shakespeare arguably invented a number of archetypal characters.  Mr. Bloom states that in some ways he may have invented the human personality, or at least given us the means to explore personality.  Mr. Bloom also points out that Shakespeare invented roughly 1200 new words of the English language.  It is true, we voice Shakespearean words and phrases, like “the King’s English”, without knowing their source.  Our language is vastly richer because of him.  In all these ways Shakespeare can be deemed universal. 

By and large, however, Shakespeare is universal primarily to those who bother and care to read him.  Step into a busy airport and ask of people randomly who Enobarbus was, and perhaps a handful will be able to identify him as a soldier and a friend to Antony, a fascinating psychological study in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra.  Or speak the words “multitudinous seas incarnadine” and anyone who has read much of Shakespeare will probably understand the reference and its context.  But the requirement is he must be read.  It is a necessary price for entering the club and for appreciating his universality.  How many in the world, or even in the Christian nations, have read him and been influenced by him?    Not a very large percentage I would venture, not even a majority.  One could even ask the question in a busy airport, who Shakespeare was, and perhaps a majority could identify him as some, old writer, but beyond that wouldn’t venture an opinion.

On the other hand, mention the name Jesus and virtually the whole world will know who he was and will have an opinion.  Or speak the word “cross”, and virtually the entire world, literate and illiterate, Christian and non-Christian alike, will know to some extent the meaning Jesus vested in that single word.  In this way, I submit, the universality of Jesus is more complete and compelling than any other literary figure.  His poetry, and particularly the sublime metaphor of suffering depicted by his ordeal on the cross, has been absorbed by the human family in a way no other poetry ever has been, or probably ever will be.  In this sense, Jesus was the creator of an eternal poetic dialogue, initiated by and continuing with, the very question he posed to his early disciples, “What think ye of Christ.”  It is an inescapable question every man and woman must someday answer.